Health special: Let's get personal

For many of us, the 14-day essential plan contains all we require for good health and successful weight loss. But you may need to follow a more individual regime

Every woman is different – physically, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually – and we each have our own ‘balancing act’, an individual combination of factors influencing core health. The things you have to juggle might include work, running a home, raising children, caring for parents, and community service. Each woman also has a combination of physical factors to balance, ranging from genetics and metabolism to environmental exposure and health history. So a one-size-fits-all approach isn’t going to be effective for everyone, and a more personalised diet is needed.

It may be that by the end of my 14-day essential eating and wellness plan you will be feeling great and shedding those toxic pounds. If so, simply continue the regime until you’ve reached your target weight. But if you aren’t sensing a shift or would like to see quicker results, there may be more specific imbalances getting in the way.

Over the years I’ve identified six major imbalances that seriously impede weight loss, no matter how few calories you consume. That’s because they have a harmful effect on your metabolism, which is the rate at which your body converts food into usable energy. You’ve probably heard a lot of talk about metabolism and how to boost it, because a higher metabolic rate enables you to burn more calories more efficiently, which is a primary goal when you are trying to lose weight. My goal is to teach you how to heal your metabolism first by fixing your core imbalance. There’s no point in trying to get an injured runner to run faster; she’ll only hurt herself and have to drop out of the race!

The core imbalances that I’ve identified often overlap, so you may have more than one affecting you at once. But don’t let that discourage you; I’ve found that when you begin to restore balance in one area, other imbalances get easier to address and sometimes even correct themselves. Below are the six major imbalances and some of the symptoms they cause. If any of them seem familiar and you would like to learn more, I give detailed two-week diet and action plans to deal with each of them in my book, The Core Balance Diet (see page 64 for our special offer).

1 Digestive imbalance

Extremely common in Western society. In fact, we often don’t notice it because we’re so used to the symptoms, but it can seriously undermine your health, metabolism and your ability to lose weight. It can lead directly to inflammation of the system and possible accumulation of fat tissue. Symptoms include:

Feeling bloated and gassy after a meal.

Craving alcohol, sugar, bread and other yeasty foods.

Flushing, spots and/or acne breakouts.

Having headaches, intestinal pain and/or joint pain two or three times a week.

The food we eat influences our hormonal balance on a daily basis and can create conditions for toxic weight gain. Chronic stress raises levels of key hormones, such as insulin and cortisol, causing you to overeat. Sometimes, even the fat in your body can alter your hormonal balance and trigger additional weight gain – a vicious cycle which is common during the perimenopause and menopause. Symptoms include:

Your adrenal glands are responsible for the fight-or-flight survival response. Nowadays, this response is activated far too often because of the stress in our lives, rather than genuine life-threatening danger. If high-level stress continues unchecked, it can lead to overeating and abdominal weight gain. Symptoms include:

To put it simply, your individual brain chemistry can cause you to gain weight and prevent you from losing it. Neurotransmitters carry information that influences mood, hunger, whether you feel full, and cravings. A neurotransmitter imbalance is another condition that can cause you to crave certain foods and eat them obsessively. Symptoms include:

Inflammation is an essential – sometimes life-saving – function of your immune system for healing wounds and fighting infection. But over-stimulation of this healing mechanism, often triggered by diet, leads to chronic inflammation, which can cause obesity and toxic weight gain. Symptoms include:

This often leads to an accumulation of toxins in fat tissue, which makes losing weight especially difficult. Poor nutrition and an unhealthy lifestyle just magnify the problem. Some toxins can even act like hormones in the body and cause additional fat to build up. Symptoms include: